Chapter 12
Ihad watched Astra Verita open the east tower door like she meant to make everyone inside admit it was locked to her whether they wanted to say it out loud or not.
Cosima Verraine did what Cosima had been asked to do.
She turned Astra away in front of the first-years who had passed, in front of Caspian Ashford, in front of me.
Astra looked at Cosima once.
Then at me.
I had been standing by the window with an excellent understanding of my own uselessness in this situation.
I stayed where I was.
Following would have made the room too interested. Following would have given Cosima more work to do and Quill more to write down later.
Knowing that did nothing for my dignity.
It made it feel like cowardice with better manners.
At six the next morning, the Mark on my right shoulder started weeping, and my arm gave out.
The apple had made it halfway to my mouth before my muscles just stopped working.
Not pain exactly.
A hard, humiliating nothing.
For a minute, the apple stayed there, suspended between hand and teeth, while the clock above me ticked on with obscene confidence, like it had all the time in the world.
Maybe it did, but I didn’t.
My left hand took over. Lowered the apple to my knee. Pretended this was a choice a person could make with dignity.
I looked out over the railing because looking at my hand any longer would make me throw the apple, and my left arm was still good enough to make that someone’s problem if it hit them.
The quad below was usually empty at six.
Today, it wasn’t.
Astra Verita crossed it alone, cutting diagonally across it from the dining hall.
She had something wrapped in waxed paper in one hand.
Bread, probably. Zenith Hall seemed determined to make bread into a currency. Bread at every meal. Half the time stale.
I preferred apples.
Halfway across the quad, Astra stopped.
For a moment, she just stood there in the cold, looking toward the west wing.
Toward the part of the building Delphine Moreau had not come back from.
She never looked up, which was good, because it meant she hadn’t seen me.
I had already been in her room without permission. I had already left apples where she slept and kissed her on a roof she had only found because I had asked her to come.
I didn’t need her catching me above the quad at six in the morning, watching from a place she could not see.
There were only so many ways to look like a bad idea before a person had to admit she was right.
I glanced down at the apple on my knee.
My right hand hadn’t moved.
I hadn’t expected it to.
At fifteen, an Oracle read my Verse too far.
A Mark was what a person carried. A Verse was what the Mark was doing to the rest of your life.
Most students heard only a line or two before graduation. Enough to choose a field, a family, a shape to grow toward. Three lines if the Oracle was feeling reckless.
Mine read twelve.
All of it.
By the last line, the Oracle looked sick and my mother was weeping uncontrollably.
And he shall not live to see his full years, for the Mark destroys.
A stupid line. Doesn’t even make sense. Too plain for the damage it did. A line like that should have arrived with more ceremony, not under an apple tree at noon on a sunny day.
But he had spoken it, and so it was.
The first line of my Mark crossed the top of my right shoulder.
That was where the Verse had entered.
That was where the ending had started counting down.
For three years, my shoulder had been the first place the ending showed itself.
A tremor. A failed lift. Numbness that came and went.
Small things. Explainable things.
Too much training. Bad sleep. Old injury.
But I knew the truth. I was twenty years old and my right arm could not lift an apple.
Astra’s Mark had moved toward Caspian Ashford in attunement.
Enough people saw it.
What they missed was worse.
Her Mark had moved wrong for a Mark built for one bond.
I knew because it had moved toward me too.
Quietly. In the east kitchen, on the night I met her, with Rev on the counter and an apple in my hand.
Astra had looked at me, and something under my Mark had answered.
I knew enough cosmology to know a Pull when it put its teeth in me.
I also knew enough to understand what it meant that her Mark had pulled toward Caspian and toward me.
So I’d brought her to the tower.
Partly because I’d wanted to kiss her from the moment I’d laid eyes on her.
But because the clock tower was the only place in Zenith Hall where wanting her did not immediately become a thing the school could use.
Or take away from me.
The truth landed before that night ended, and for thirty-six hours, it stayed where all dangerous knowledge stayed: behind my teeth.
There were books in the archive no one had opened in fifty years. Aldric had signed for them because Aldric had the decency not to ask a dying boy why he wanted old cosmology.
The books avoided the word save.
They used rewrite.
A Mark like Astra’s could rewrite the ending of a Verse like mine.
Save would have been cleaner. Kinder. A word with a window in it.
Rewrite meant the ending stayed. Something had to reach into the sentence and change what the sentence cost.
But asking would be theft.
Worse than theft.
It would be evidence.
Sadie Corwin had taught us what happened when a girl’s Mark became evidence before the girl understood the charge.
Rev still cried about Sadie. I heard her sometimes in the kitchen, though she tried to hide it.
I refused to add Astra’s name to that lesson just because I wanted to live.
So I would keep my mouth shut.
Apples, yes. Kisses, if she wanted them. The roof. The wind.
That was the line.
My life did not belong in her hands as a burden she had never agreed to carry.
If the bond happened, it would happen because Astra chose it, with as much of the truth as I could give her without putting a knife in the school’s hand.
My shoulder ached under my coat.
The apple waited on my knee.
My left hand lifted it.
I still had time.
I had been telling myself that for years.
This morning, for the first time, I did not believe me.